If there’s anything worse than getting a bad Tetris clone for free, that would be paying for a bad version of Tetris. That’s where Nigel Williams’ Touchcris ($2) comes in, as yet another unfinished, audio-free, demo-quality iPhone game with a price tag. Here, you get the standard Tetris well, the right general balance of dispensed blocks, and some almost normal controls—swipe to move the block, flick or tilt the iPhone to rotate. In practice, the controls wind up eliminating any precision you might want to have while playing, but that’s not the really weird part of Touchcris.

For some reason, the developer has come up with a bizarre system of multi-touch tricks that need to be learned to do simple things like… restarting the game once it has ended and apparently crashed. You need to touch the screen simultaneously with three fingers to pause, four fingers to reset, and five fingers—think about that for a second, and try it on your phone—to activate a mode where the well displays in a forced 3-D perspective, in some cases cropping off part of the screen. It took us 20 or more tries to get the 3-D mode to activate, and then, it added nothing to the game; like BreakTouch 3D, the graphical twist just made play less fun. This effect is the only thing that’s remotely unique here, but we wouldn’t consider dropping even a cent on this title until the control and interface issues are sorted out. iLounge Rating: D+.

Editors' Note: iLounge only reviews products in "final" form, but many companies now change their offerings - sometimes several times - after our reviews have been published.
This iLounge article provides more information on this practice, known as revving.